Abstract

Special issues often capture a moment in time, an efflorescence of
critical engagement, or an urgent and timely shift in a field. If
most special issues are snapshots, "Feminisms
and DH" is something more like a long-exposure photograph,
a surreal composite that is simultaneously fiction and fact.

Let me indulge in a bit of scene-setting to help elucidate what I
mean about the surrealism of this issue and as way of practicing the
kind of self-disclosure that Chris Bourg and Bess Sadler argue is an
important design and accessibility feature in feminist work [Bourg and Sadler 2015]. Katherine D. Harris and I first proposed
this special issue to the editorial board of DHQ in January of 2012. We had been part of ongoing
discussions about "silences" in archives and were relatively
fresh off of a challenging roundtable titled "Editing Digital Feminisms" at the 2011 meeting of the
Society of Textual Scholarship (STS), which also included Marilee
Lindeman and Martha Nell Smith. The roundtable was great; what was
challenging from my perspective was the clear gender profile of
those in attendance – ours was a room full of women. While it was
(is) disheartening to imagine that our male colleagues weren’t
interested in feminist DH work, it struck us as particularly strange
given the history of the field. As Harris and I noted in our call
for this special issue, "several of the major DH
projects that are now at the forefront of the field had feminist
imperatives at the outset (for example: Women Writers Project,
the Orlando Project, and the Dickenson Archive), but it does not
seem to us that there has been a sustained inquiry into the
evolving relationships between feminist theory and DH
work."

In calling for a more sustained consideration of relationships
between feminist theories and digital humanities, we were calling
for engagements that helped enrich our sense of why feminisms
mattered to DH, beyond simply getting more women in the rooms. In
addition to issues of equity and access, at stake in the conception
of this special issue were the ethics and commitments in digital
humanities scholarship and teaching. Within a 12-month span leading
up to the proposal, there were discussions at the Modern Language
Association meeting about who was in and who was out of DH,[1]
Jamie Skye Bianco’s "This Digital Humanities
Which is Not One" and Tara McPherson’s "Why is the Digital Humanities So White?"
came out in print, and the seeds of the three-site THATCamp
Feminisms were sown by debates about coding, gender, and the
politics of DH. In response, the creative and critical pieces in
this special issue work to think not just about gender parity and
recovery, modes central to second wave feminisms, but also about
intersectional identities, labor, affect, and materiality in ways
aligned with third-wave and decolonizing feminisms. Several of the
pieces also reach outside of the admittedly porous boundaries of DH
to include Library and Information Studies, Postcolonial Studies,
Ethnography, and Game Studies as explicitly feminist interventions
in a field that can feel dominated by literary and textual
studies.

By invoking the surreality of long-exposure photography I mean to
point to the ways the interventions here are as necessary and fresh
as they might have been in 2012 or 2013. Given the production time,
this should be a blurry photograph, but the lack of sustained
engagement with feminist theory within DH makes it still rather
clear. Rather than being superseded, the interventions of each
piece, and of the collection as a whole, have only become more
urgent and it is striking that the field has not yet seen another
special issue on feminisms and digital humanities. As I write this
introduction the annual ADHO Digital Humanities conference is taking
place in Sydney, Australia. In some ways it seems as if nothing has
changed. As Scott Weingart has observed is his series of blog posts
on the ADHO conference, while 46% of DH2015 attendees are women,
they make up only 35% of authors with accepted papers.[2] What’s more, his
analysis suggests that part of what makes DH so white (to paraphrase
McPherson) is that "there’s a very clear bias
against submissions by people with names non-standard to the
US."[3] Now, it is worth noting that a
single year does not a trend make (although he sees stable numbers
over three years with respect to gender) and that the ADHO
conference is not necessarily representative of the entirety of
digital humanities scholarship. Nevertheless, the questions we posed
in the call for this issue about the presence of a masculinized
research/tools track and a feminized pedagogy track, the elided
histories of feminist intervention, and exclusionary cultures within
DH are as urgent today as they were in 2012

"Feminisms and DH" confronts a number of
methodological and topical biases that continue to haunt the field
according to Weingart’s analysis. Jamie Skye Bianco’s "Man and His Tool, Again?: Queer and Feminist Notes
on Practices in the Digital Humanities and Object Orientations
Everywhere" uses a performative mode, previously theorized
in her 2012 "This Digital Humanities Which is
Not One," to critique heteropatriarchal biases in a
textual studies dominated digital humanities. Her piece exemplifies
the "socially engaged critical
creativity" advocated by feminist scholars like Sarah
Kember and Joanna Zylenska; a thinking with and through the tools
that we critique [Kember and Zylinska 2013]. Her piece and the
companion teaching reflection by Nicole Starosielski push the
boundaries of traditional academic argument by insisting that
"creative critique" is central to how we communicate amongst
ourselves as scholars and with and to our students.

Equally critical, argues Roopika Risam, is intersectionality as
"a lens for scholarship in the digital
humanities [that] resists binary logic, encourages complex
analysis, and foregrounds difference." This is an
important corrective that we have seen recently emerge in projects
like the Digital Diversity Timeline, Amy Earhart’s Diverse Histories
of DH, and Global Outlook DH to tell more diverse histories of
digital humanities work and thereby imagine alternative futures.
Risam draws on Sandra Harding’s work in feminist and postcolonial
Science and Technology Studies (STS), to foreground the
relationships between difference and technology. In addition to
suggesting the value of alternative histories, Risam does the
difficult work of charting theoretical foundations for alternative
digital humanities "methods that advocate
inclusion and critical analysis but are situated in the
materiality of technologies." In ways that blend the kind
of theoretical and historiographic work of both Risam and Bianco,
Gabrielle Dean’s "The Shock of the Familiar:
Three Timelines about Gender and Technology in the
Library" offers a set of provocations about not only the
history of librarianship and information technology, but also about
its possible futures. Like Bianco, Dean plays with argumentative
form, drawing on the timeline as both a critical and speculative
genre. Both Dean and Tanya Clement draw on Library and Information
Science disciplines to push digital humanists to grapple with both
the physical and epistemological sites of DH work, which is very
often housed in libraries and archives either literary,
metaphorically, or both.

Clement’s "The Information Science Question in
DH Feminism" brings the question of infrastructure and its
situated relations to the fore specifically through Information
Science and architectures and systems of knowledge. Like Bianco,
Risam, and Losh, Clement is interested the ways that a feminist
insistence on situated knowledge and "technologies of self-consciousness" draws attention to
technocultures and their underlying epistemic commitments. Drawing
on her own work on the Baroness von Freytag, Clement deftly
demonstrates how tools and subject become entangled as she pursues
the social text/body/network. The social body/network is central as
well to Moya Bailey’s "#transform(ing)DH Writing
and Research: An Autoethnography of Digital Humanities and
Feminist Ethics." Bailey further expands the question of
how we communicate amongst ourselves when undertaking research by
blurring the boundaries between the researcher and her
"subjects." Prioritizing "collaborative connections" in
order to enact a praxis of care that she sees at work in Black trans
women’s use of Twitter, Bailey’s autoethnography charts a different
mode of scholarly engagement than that envisioned by standard
protocols in the social sciences.

Elizabeth Losh looks to feminist Media and Game Studies and STS to
suggest that it is critical to move networks and power formations
from ground to figure in feminist digital humanities. Citing the
example of the Ludica collective (Celia Pearce, Jacki Morie, Tracy
Fullerton and Janine Fron), she also imagines new ways for
collaborative, communal feminist work to unfold within DH.
Collaboration and social networks might be keywords for this special
issue. Bailey and Losh both point us to scholarly practitioners who
act as and within communities. Similar modalities have histories
within scholarly and activist communities of women of color, trans,
and queer folks. Work like that of the Crunk Feminist Collective
(http://crunkfeministcollective.tumblr.com/), Electronic
Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g lab (http://bang.transreal.org/about/), the LatiNegrxs Project
(http://lati-negros.tumblr.com/) and GO::DH (http://www.globaloutlookdh.org/ demonstrate that
interdisciplinary and inclusive collaborative communities have long
been present if not centered in digital humanities work. They also
illuminate how powerful community-driven mixed-media scholarship can
be — both as models of scholarly practice and as arguments that
illuminate technologies and practices of oppression.

Constance Crompton, Ray Siemens, Alyssa Arbuckle, and the DMSEG team
use "Enlisting 'Vertues Noble & Excelent'
Across Scholarly Cultures: Digital Collaboration and the Social
Edition" to reflect on the affordances and limitations of
social editing for the Devonshire Manuscript, a text that is itself
deeply social and networked. The team sought to create an inclusive,
visible editorial process as a way of prioritizing the processes of
editing and social networking over a traditional model of
consumption. In this they are perhaps the most conventional of all
of the projects discussed here, in so far as they are producing a
digital edition of an early modern text. But their efforts to expand
beyond traditional scholarly platforms and communities place their
work firmly in line with the other feminist interventions in this
special issue. These efforts were repaid with insights on the ways
that wiki platforms might enact social support functions akin to
early modern marginalia and, as if responding to Losh and Clement,
they foreground their own feminist epistemological commitments
through both their processes and their platform. But they also had
to grapple with the presence of trolls in their open edition, making
it clear that digital platforms are always "contact zones" of
the kind discussed by Mary Louis Pratt [Pratt 1991].
Spaces where difference, dissensus, and even abuse can mingle in the
social text.

I began this introduction by invoking the analogy of long-exposure
photography, which produces surreal images in part because it
obscures differences across time. Streaky starry night images
preserve the traces of celestial bodies that appear at the beginning
of an evening, but are no longer visible by morning. We don’t have a
good equivalent of this in academic publishing. The contributors to
this volume are doing the hard work of bringing feminist theories
and practice together, each in her/their own way and their important
work is preserved here in this issue. Process — the additions,
deletions, revisions evoked by the social edition of the Devonshire
Manuscript project — is far less visible. Perhaps this is a way in
which the special issue is more surreal that the long-exposure
photograph; in advancing itself as a snapshot it erases the long
arc, privileging just the final product. Without this introduction,
"Feminisms and DH" could well appear
to be the labor of a single issue editor when it was inaugurated by
two and significantly supported by DHQ
staff. It could look like a collection of eleven authors across
eight pieces, instead of an issue that contains within it the traces
and published work of seventeen authors across fourteen pieces.

As feminist theory has long known, our work is embodied and this
embodiment manifests in this issue as institutional and professional
limits, geographic moves, pregnancies, illnesses, and
self-determining redirections. In some instances this has left gaps
in the final product – spaces where voices were to be heard, but
aren’t for a variety of reasons. These absent voices register for me
as faded streaks in the long exposure image. Harris and I invited
more experimental pieces for an "assemblage" section in our
original call, which is realized in Bailey, Bianco, and Dean’s
pieces but was envisioned to be larger and more experimental still.
A vibrant discussion of the distance between the representation of
women in the profession and feminist agendas is absent and much
needed. Engagement with queer theories and praxis are similarly
limited despite the great work being done in venues like ada: the journal of gender, new media,
and technology (see for example issue #5 on
Queer Feminist Media Praxis).

The pieces herein are working to redefine DH and they all point to
larger, often marginalized fields of creative and critical work.
Bailey and Rissam’s articles function as entrée points to the work
being done by women and feminists of color both in the U.S. and
internationally that has too often had to find home outside of DH as
such but is nevertheless transforming both how scholarship is done
and on what terms. Crompton et al.’s chapter similarly points to the
rich vein of work being done and still to be done on the various
affordances and risks of social media and open platforms for
feminist digital production and scholarship. As suggested by Bianco,
Dean, and Clement, a more robust theorization of feminist digital
humanities requires understanding the ways in which academic
structures subsume feminist innovation and critique, appropriating
both the insights and power of subversive work. Finally, as nearly
every piece herein demonstrates, if we are to have a more just
feminist digital humanities, we must attend to the ways that
academic practices and digital spaces and tools are being leveraged
by those with power — very often to limit marginalized people and at
the most extreme in order to consume or promote violence against
women, people of color, and trans people.

Gaps and silences aren’t unique to this special issue – there are
always declined invitations, rejected articles, pieces withdrawn or
delayed or never written – but having had the privilege of watching
the process, they strike me as important traces. Affect, another
feminist keyword, was everywhere present in struggles over and in
reviews, anxieties about timelines, celebrations of new directions,
and the mourning of losses. Anger, frustration, sorrow, and joy are
co-present on these pages and in the margins of this issue, and yet
are nearly absent from the reader’s perspective. From the privileged
position of editor, I am acutely aware of how disciplinary,
technical, and personal constraints have shaped this volume.

I draw attention to this as a way of testifying obliquely to the
challenges that continue to shape feminist engagements within
digital humanities (probably within academia more generally as
well). I want to observe openly that this volume is shaped in ways
that may well be inarticulable but are at the heart of feminist
commitments to seeing knowledge production as material, embodied,
affective, situated, and labor. bell hooks writes about citing gaps
in archives and histories as a way to "let the
reader know that something has been missed" and I want to
mark that the pressures that come to bear on women’s bodies, lives,
and work mean that there are known gaps here [hooks 2004]. One of the great insights, I think, of the
contributions to this volume is that there are also many unknown
gaps and that intersectional, interdisciplinary, and multimodal work
is essential to that process of seeing what we do not yet know is
missing. Ellen Rooney argues that "feminist
address" is a performative, critical act that creates
constituencies and brings feminist positions into being – it is a
generative, poetic process through which alternative futures are
created [Rooney 2006]. Herein are eight different
modes of feminist address and they are powerful but partial
beginnings.